Camus At Popeye's

Fries And Whispers: An Experiment In Existential Marketing [Open with a series of single shots.   The first is of an austere but stately home from afar.   Cut to the interior of the house.   It is a large sitting room.   Victorian style furniture crowds the room.   The feeling of the room is extravagant but cold.   Cut again to the inside of a bedroom.   A woman lies in the bed on her side.   Now cut to a close up of the woman.   Her skin is pale and her eyes are sunken. She moves, but barely.   It is clear that the slightest bit of movement requires an almost superhuman amount of effort.   From off frame, a towel is placed on her forehead.   We zoom out and see a plump, kindly woman leaning over her.   She places the towel in a washbasin and wets it again, placing it back on the sickly woman’s forehead.   Her devotion is unmistakable.] Nurse [she speaks in Swedish, as do all the other characters.   Th...

This follows up on the previous slide guitar post with a useful way to play major stuff.  The last post  focused on playing minor pentatonic stuff on the top two strings.  Unfortunately, there's no good way to play a major third on the top two strings.

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. -Albert Camus, The Myth Of Sisyphus "I wanted to cling to that moment, and I thought, "Come what may, this is happiness.  I cannot wish for anything better.  Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection and I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much." - Cries And Whispers

Recently, a film historian was able to unearth a handful of previously unknown films by James Incandenza.  These films were not included in the filmography compiled by David Foster Wallace for his book Infinite Jest, which was previously assumed to be exhaustive.  For completeness sake, we have summarized these newly unearthed films below:

A really cool and useful technique to know if you're a guitarist is how to play some slide.  Whenever I'm playing with a group and I pull out the slide to add some flavor to a song, the other guys almost inevitably love it.  Not only that, because the sound itself is so expressive, you don't need to be able to play anything really flashy or complicated.  If the part calls for something technically demanding, you probably shouldn't be using a slide, unless that's your forte.  If you just need to add some color and some tasty fills, though, it's a great way to sound soulful and unique.  Unfortunately, if you're not familiar with slide at all, it can be frustrating; and, a shitty, out of tune slide part is just about the worst possible thing you can contribute to a song as a guitarist.

Tycho Brahe Needs To Use The Bathroom The following is based on a true story “To life!” bellowed the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II. What this statement, the corpulent, hirsute monarch raised his beer stein and drank.   Seated at the far end of the table, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler duly raised their glasses and drank as well.   At this moment — October 13, 1601 — the duo were the most accomplished astronomers in human history.   They were at the party at the king’s request, and since Tycho’s entire livelihood depended on Rudolph’s patronage, invitations were not to be refused.

One thing that is mystifying about writing chord progressions, or melodies, or riffs, is trying to figure out what separates a good one from a bad one.  I think it's basically some combination of structure and surprise.  If you just play a scale up and down, no one will be interested; if you just play totally random notes, there isn't enough to latch on to.  So the key is finding a way to play things that make sense and sound good but still surprise people's ears somehow.  One way is to just noodle around until something sounds good; or, you can take the opposite approach and try to work something out based on a theoretical idea.  I'm going to write about a concept that I've noticed in a few songs, and used myself, that is somewhere in between these two extremes.  It's something I think of as interval shifting.